Abstract
Social constructionism, an interdisciplinary paradigm, has emerged from a crisis in the social sciences in the late 20th century (Gergen 1999). This crisis is around the failure of modernist values to help us understand, and achieve mastery over, the worlds we live around a number of cohering areas. These include 'grand narrative', 'imperialist' claims to the true nature of a supposed external reality (realism) and the true nature of something or someone (essentialism). Not surprisingly, suspicion has been increasingly accorded to related modernist assumptions of selves as rational agents, free to make choices and take direct action on the world. All of this has called into question the notion of individual consciousness as a reliable and adequate mirror of this world, with language as a nonproblematic, neutral and descriptive vehicle of representation.
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